Much like some of Bacon's work, this film is fascinating, slightly repulsive, and filled with a strange beauty. The camera eye is a painter's brush, sketching out lines, shapes and colours, distorting and fragmenting its subjects in its effort to see them in all their detail, until finally the film becomes a painting itself.

The narrative picks up in 1964 when George Dyer (Craig) drops into Bacon's studio through the skylight in a failed attempt at burglary, and becomes Bacon's lover. Their complicated relationship is explored as Dyer joins the hedonistic circle of people surrounding the painter, and slowly succumbs to the excesses brought about by drink, drugs and seemingly endless supplies of money. Bacon (Jacobi), initially inspired by Dyer, begins to find him an irritation, but nonetheless cannot bring himself to leave him. Bacon is portrayed as the true tortured artist, from the opening scene where he tries to find the essence of his dead lover in the bedclothes, through to the beautiful shots of him in isolation while his voice talks about ever-present and unrelieved loneliness. His flippant and sarcastic public treatment of anything serious, mainly his relationship with Dyer, is shown as the surface veneer of a deeply troubled man.

A wonderful supporting cast includes Tilda Swinton as Muriel Belcher and Anne Lambton as Isabel Rawsthorne, but they are seen, as are all people in the film, mainly in swirls of distorted flesh and fragments of body parts. A haunting score by Ryuichi Sakamoto completes this assault on the senses. As an inside look into the life of a creative genius, "Love is the Devil" is interesting; as a film, it is a thing of perverse beauty.